Finding your Windows Product Key

A friend of mine has an old computer running Windows Me he was getting ready to get rid of, because he was told that in order for him to solve the problem within Windows, he would have to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows. He didn’t consider that to be an option, because he could no longer find the product key and was considering getting a new updated computer.

I believe there is a way to retrieve the product key from the registry without going through the trouble of contacting Microsoft tech support.
Go to start, click on Run. In Run’s Open box type “regedit” (without the quotations) and click OK. In the Registry editor, look in the left pane for the HKEY_Local_Machine line and click on its plus sign.

In the left pane now, look for the Software line and click on the plus sign. Look for the Microsoft reference. Click on the plus sign, and then click on the plus sign next to Windows. A new folder then appear, highlight the reference to CurrentVersion (click on the reference itself and not the plus sign.

In the right-hand pane, find the Product Key entry. That will be the key you want to reinstall Windows. It should look like something this: ProductId REG_SZ D62UV-GHF7Q-QBKY9-QQDH9-VJ2GG.

This will work as long as Windows is still working, you didn’t reformat the hard drive and you can access the registry. Don't even try this with Windows XP. The product id in the photo is not good.